Hardcover(Reprint)

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Overview

A major new edition of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy,an outstanding landmark of Elizabethan drama. In its time, it quickly became a box office success and probably inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet, as it contains a ghost, murders that demand revenge and a hero that hesitates and contemplates suicide. As a revenge tragedy, it set up the salient features of a dramatic genre that would last decades. Its hero, the aged Marshall of Spain Hieronimo, whose son is murdered at night, soon transcended the play and became the standard stage representation of grief, rhetorical passion and madness. Hieronimo's main antagonist is one of the first Machiavellian characters of English drama.

This edition explores the play in relation to its historical context and contemporary Iberian dynastic policy. It also relates the play, as a literary artefact, to other artistic manifestations of the European Renaissance and offers a fresh assessment of the play's stage history. For the first time in the play's textual history, this edition presents an integrated text inviting a reading of the play as it was published both in 1592 and in 1602.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781408129982
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 03/14/2013
Series: Arden Early Modern Drama Series
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 392
Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Clara Calvo, University of Murcia, Spain
Jesus Tronch, University of Valencia, Spain

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Thomas Kyd: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

The Spanish Tragedy

Appendix A: Additional Passages of 1602

Appendix B: Documents in the Life of Thomas Kyd

  1. From Richard Mulcaster, Positions (1581)
  2. Letter from Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council (11 May 1593)
  3. Thomas Kyd, Two Letters to Sir John Puckering (1593)
  4. Thomas Kyd, Dedication to Robert Garnier’s Cornelia (1594)

Appendix C: The Question of Revenge

  1. From the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Romans
  2. From Seneca, Thyestes (first century CE)
  3. From “A Sermon against Contention and Brawling” (1547)
  4. From Richard Jones, The Book of Honor and Arms (1590)
  5. From William Westerman, Two Sermons of Assize (1600)
  6. From Ben Jonson, Introduction to Bartholomew Fair (1614)
  7. Sir Francis Bacon, “Of Revenge” (1625)

Appendix D: Violence and Entertainment in Elizabethan England

  1. From Robert Langham, A Letter (1575)
  2. From William Harrison, Description of England (1586)
  3. From Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses (1595)
  4. John Norden, Map of London (1593)
  5. The Triple Tree at Tyburn

Appendix E: The Social Construction of Women at Court

  1. From Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1528)
  2. From Juan Luis Vives, Instruction of Christian Women (1529)
  3. Queen Elizabeth’s Armada Speech to the Troops at Tilbury (9 August 1588)
  4. Lady Arbella Stuart, Letter to King James (c. December 1610)
  5. From Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613)

Appendix F: Spain in Elizabethan Culture

  1. From Richard Hakluyt, A Discourse on Western Planting (1584)
  2. From A Fig for the Spaniard (1591)
  3. From Sir Walter Raleigh, A Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Iles of Azores (1591)

Works Cited and Further Reading

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